February 11, 2025 - 11:00am
Generation-Z women in the UK are considerably more likely than men to think that the country is racist, according to new polling.
New YouGov data found that nearly half of all Brits (48%) aged 18-27 believe Britain is a racist country. But within that figure there was a startling gender divide: women are 21 points more likely than men to agree with this statement, at 58% to 37%. Female Zoomers are also 18 points less likely to believe that Britain is a tolerant nation (38%), and 20 points less likely to take pride in being British (31%).
The research, carried out with the Times, asked 1,161 adults aged 18-27 a series of questions to ascertain how British Zoomers feel about national identity and integration. It followed a similar examination by the newspaper in 2004 of the social views of people who were then aged 18-27. In the intervening 20 years, the proportion of young people who say they are proud to be British has almost halved, from 80% to 41%. Similarly, in the same time period the proportion of young Britons who believe their country is racist has risen from 34% to 48%.
In the 2024 polling, young women consistently rank as more socially liberal than their male counterparts when responding to statements such as “Immigration into Britain is good for our economy and society” and “I would marry someone of a different race”. This disparity between the sexes is broader than that for people from varying socioeconomic backgrounds or levels of education.
While young women were significantly more likely to hold the view that Britain is racist, they were also more likely to respond “Don’t know” than male participants in the survey. On the question of national pride, women were nine percentage points more likely to express uncertainty; for whether Britain is a racist country, the figure was five points. There was not a single question to which more men than women responded “Don’t know”.
Academics and researchers have observed a political gender gap across the West, in which young women have moved further to the Left from men, for several years. In 2022, the political scientist Eric Kaufmann detailed the “astounding gender divergence in youth attitudes”, which primarily manifested in views on cultural issues such as racial discrimination and political correctness. Gen-Z women have been found elsewhere to hold predominantly progressive social views, while the biggest gaps in party voting at the 2024 UK general election were at opposite ends of the political spectrum.
Responding to the YouGov poll, Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch said: “It is particularly shocking that so many young people think Britain is a racist country. It is absolutely not the case, but this is what happens when we let false narratives take root.”
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeIt would be interesting to see the racial breakdown of these numbers. I suspect that the anti-white, anti-British racism of non-white ethnic groups is a major factor in why these numbers are so high.
I also suspect there’s a growing segment of conservatives who agree that Britain is indeed a racist country—the rape gangs, the Southport atrocity, the Nottingham attacks, the Manchester bombing, two-tier policing, institutional anti-white hate in schools, culture, and business. The literal demographic replacement. It’s a very strong case. Much stronger than narcissistic claims from legally protected classes of people…protected because of their skin colour!
I disagree. The feminization of academia at all levels creates a view through the lens of victim identity and trauma. With the support of the male of a certain ilk the results is the end western civilization. As men, of the other ilk, have conquered the elements, disease, and external threats this is where it leads.
Through this lens the women naturally identify with, or at least must outwardly support, others that wrap themselves in the mantle of oppression and victim identity. The cannot deny another cohorts bleating of oppression without making suspect their own. Of course that support doesn’t apply to white male oppressors, the common enemy.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/in-loco-masculi
Female students and administrators often exist in a co-dependent relationship, united by the concepts of victim identity and of trauma. For university females, there is not, apparently, strength in numbers. The more females’ ranks increase, the more we hear about a mass nervous breakdown on campus.
Imagine if feminists – or for that matter, anyone on the identitarian, “progressive” left – were themselves subject to hate speech laws.
They’d soon be out of business. At the very least, there’d be an endless squad of Bobbies in the dooryard handing out police cautions.
I think both you and Victor James are probably right, it’s not a case of either/or.
This.
Does ‘UnHerd Staff’ as author mean AI? It reads as if it were written by AI…
Yes. Too many statistics.
A few well drawn charts could make all that clear and leave more page space for a more nuanced exposition of the topic. That would require a human author.
As a paid subscriber, I’d be very disappointed if they were just sending us AI dreck.
The assumption is that a ‘racist’ Britain is a ‘white’ Britain.
I wonder if part of the rise in ‘perceived’ racism is perhaps an expanding ‘white’ demographic who imagine, justified or otherwise, that Britain is increasingly racist towards them ?
I too am curious as to the composition of the survey, other than ‘just’, male, female. Do ‘white’ British perceive their country differently to those ‘British’ from other demographics?
Young women are very often the enforcers of a new orthodoxy.
They have biological imperatives.
Remain within the Overton window and proclaim your virtue.
Find a societally approved mate
Make babies in a societally approved framework
Avoid ostracisation at all costs.
Denounce & disavow the others to shore up your credentials.
This also applies to feminised men.
Or male ‘Allies’ as they would no doubt prefer to be called.
“It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.”
– George Orwell, 1984
No doubt feminist theory would disown this because it was written by a man, thus proving it at the same time.
I reject that this is a biological imperative. Even if you’re ostracized and your mate is socially unapproved, your children still count as an evolutionary success.
Far better biologically to have 4-6 kids with a traditional husband and be despised by society, than to have one at age 37 with a soy-boy mate, and get likes on socials.
Yes, but women evolved this compulsion to conform long long ago, at a time when resources were scarce and protection of the tribe was essential. You couldn’t raise 4-6 kids in a vacuum. However, though women’s biological imperative still requires conformity, women can now express their modern individualism by buying stuff.
The disparity of opinion along sex demographics is striking and could have many different or even unknowable causes but I wonder how much of this is about the human need for spirituality and religion as fake or untrue as it is. That is, the “god shaped hole” and all that…
I suspect women are especially subject to spiritual need as they birth children* which are literal pieces of themselves and they cannot stand or accept that those pieces will one day coldly and absolutely cease to go forward in time.
* Of course many women do not ever birth human children but even so have surrogates: work, projects, pets, causes….
I doubt that . Firstly they may worry their white male children would have difficulty getting a good job because of DEI . I love my dog but it’s never made me feel Britain is racist .
Your comment about your dog is both poignant and flatly hysterical. However, what I am saying is that it’s possible many of these young woman have latched on to Woke as a quasi religion in place of more traditional cults and swallow all of its precepts with the same zeal as they have an innate need for spirituality of some / any kind…
I think it’s that they are literally taught at school that Britain is racist and has benefited from evil colonialism . Boys may just be less attentive or more into their other interests .
Perhaps so…
“Young women far more likely than men to think Britain is racist'”
This does not surprise me. Generation Z females were born into and nurtured on Tony Blair’s radical worldview (which, inter alia, asserted that Britain’s ‘monochrome’ culture was systemically racist – hence his undeclared, unofficial policy during his premiership to facilitate the admission, with little or no controls, of non-White immigrants into the UK (he candidly admitted to this in a feature length Sunday Times interview after his resignation in 2007). So by the time they became teenagers from 2007 onwards, their minds had already been poisoned by this foundation DEI propaganda, driven by an aggressive feminism that taught them to despise the oppressive patriarchy and to view themselves as amongst the oppressed victims of history, alongside the Blacks of Africa and other peoples exploited and enslaved by British colonialism, led by toxic makes and white supremacists.
When studying for her GCSE’s at a UK comprehensive school, our daughter was fed all the above propaganda in her history lessons. In one of them she asked her teacher if the salves exported across the Atlantic to the Americas had themselves been captured by fellow Black and sold on to European slavers at the trading depots on the West African coast. Her teacher immediately stated that such questions were “racist” and shut her up.
Thereafter our daughter was called ‘The Racist” by her classmates, and none of her teachers ever intervened. Thankfully, she is a strong personality and dealt with this appalling treatment and is now a highly successful professional – but the emotional scars remain. I give the above example by way of illustrating how egregious was/is the educational and social environment in which these impressionable girls existed. Is it any wonder that they should emerge from the DEI ‘long march through the institutions’ perceiving that they as women (‘wimin’) share victimhood with other oppressed categories like POC’s/BAMEs, trans and the like. Millennial and latterly Gen-Z women, brainwashed into the DEI worldview by their education and smart phone technology, have since matured into positions of widespread leadership and influence in the workplace. Of course their majority view that Britain is racist will have effected the nation’s overall self-perception.
Amazing these white females don’t feel a biological imperative to look out for the interests of their sons . Perhaps they reckon they’ll all turn into woke moguls or wealthy human rights lawyers like Gary Lineker or Lord Hermer.
Or is there a change after they become mothers ?
There are lots of job in DEI or the upper reaches of the police or publishing only obtainable by women who identify with the worldview that Britain is racist . Women dominate the teaching profession wherein saying Britain wasn’t racist could lead to social ostracism .
They encourage their so sons to become daughters. There is nothing worse today than to be white, straight, cisgendered and male.
I really feel it is possible to draw any conclusion you want from surveys like this. For example, what is the definition of Britishness participants are being asked to comment on? For myself, i count myself as proudly British, but my idea of that concept is probably very different from how other people would see it.
Yes.
And those differences of opinion are what makes a nation, as opposed to a cult. Isn’t that sort of the point of “The Canterbury Tales”?
Perhaps this is why the birthrate is going down.
I guess these ‘zoomers’ are just not familiar with literally any other country
Or maybe they think all countries are racist, in which case the distinction for Britain isn’t meaningful
I was going to make a similar point. The simple push-back, which I have yet to see in a televised interview, is for the accuser to have to illustrate their point by referencing a functioning nation or society that meets their criterion for non-racist. What can we learn from this nation?
Only White Majority countries are racist.
You don’t see racism or sectarianism or xenophobia or sexism anywhere else in the world. Only in the White West. Definitely not in Africa for example.
Jonathon Haidt 101. The feminization of our institutions and the elevation of egalitarianism and harm as the only possible axes of moral behavior. Put them all in the army for 2 years
Neurosis being normalised
What can I say? Kinder, Küche, Kirche was a very smart slogan.
But women will understand this only in 20 years, when they will be beaten with a stick for appearing outside the house without a husband. Although no, they will not understand, because they will consider this punishment natural and reasonable.
Yes, but my hijab and burkha business profits will be massive!
18 to 27-year-olds must have been reading the Daily Telegraph, or watching GB News. People who go on and on about how bad Britain is, and who are not always wrong about that, react with fury when, in particular, the young agree with them, and do so not because of school, at least in the sense of what was formally taught, but because of life.
There are nine Labour MPs who were born after 1995, and while one of those is Nadia Whittome, are the others in the Reserves? Is the 26-year-old Liberal Democrat, whose party has only once its 37-year history seen a war that it did not like? Their contemporaries rightly do not fancy being sent to their deaths by people who would never go.
And if only 11 per cent of them would trust the Police if they were victims of crime, then they must have been listening to Nigel Farage, Richard Tice, Lee Anderson and Rupert Lowe, all of whom have denounced two-tier policing on the floor of the House of Commons, while their party’s other MP appears to be mute in general, although his past life makes it fairly easy to guess his opinion on this issue.
They are being fed the British form of CRT in 6th form colleges as well as university, that’s clear. In contrast, the boys have the internet and their alt-right podcasts.
It would be interesting to compare this to the number of women and men who actually do this, and what racial choices they make.
Young women are certainly being encouraged to ‘marry’ someone of a different race judging by the number of TV adverts that almost exclusively portray ‘white’ women with ‘black’ males. Why? The cynic in me suggests that we are being forced, by the mainstream media and governments to accept the predominantly young, black males arriving on the southern-shores of the UK. What chance does a young, ‘average’ in terms of education and job prospects white male have in the UK against such normalisation?
If I’d been fed the garbage that this particular generation has been fed during their academic life I’d probably think the same.The problem isn’t the young people,it’s the ideologues that have peddled this cr@p.
Gen Z is so yesterday.
Tomorrow belongs to the Alphas and Betas, the ones who have never learned to regulate their emotions due to being exposed to screens from day one after leaving the womb.
The ones who would have difficulty concentrating long enough to complete an opinion poll, never having developed the long attention span that is the by-product of learning to read.
The ironically monikered “alphas” are anything but.
On the question of marrying outside their race, I would like to see a breakout of the female respondents for
1. Level of education
2. Obesity
The implication being made here is not a nice nor moral one.
I doubt that the poll respondents aren’t nice or moral either…
Who cares what the young think?
They are gullible and their opinions are worthless.
It is only past 30 that people start to talk sense, which is exactly why Labour want to lower the voting age.
I’m afraid when the number and domination of the non-White immigrants grows more and starts affecting the lives of young women more than what the “racist British” do, then they’ll understand what real racism is…. but that’ll be too late!